Out Of Joe’s Mind – A Unity Developers Diary

After getting a lot of feedback that my previous character was scary (girl on the left), I spent a lot of time doing tutorials and reading my books and talking to people about efficient 3d design.
Once I felt my ability in 3d had improved to the point that I knew better what I was doing I had another attempt at making a model which after a couple of days of work resulted in the female on the right.
When I finished her I was extremely proud of the improvement I made, but she was still on the wrong side of the uncanny valley so I went back to talking to the other developers. This was when they suggested I try a more stylized approach, and showed me different styles they’ve worked with over the years and explained the pitfalls they found, going down certain paths and showed images of styles they were happy with.
It was at this point I decided to attempt chibi, the height to width ratio makes clothing easier, the boxy smooth nature of the body lends itself nicely to simple block meshes subdivided, and if done to an ok level can turn out really cute. Still not happy with my rig and the animations so I will continue to work on that when I wake up tomorrow, but other than that I’m really happy with how the chibi model turned out, and I hope you are too. (chibi model is below)